Angel Eyes (33 page)

Fukuda and Honno kept to the shadows ringing the walls. Honno could see the irizumi-covered Yakuza, their fantastically conceived tattoos given a life of their own by the movements of their bodies as they moved packets of money around the tables.

This was no local gambling house; these were games played for the highest possible stakes. And now Honno began to concentrate on the faces that belonged to the gamblers: the conservatively dressed, immaculately groomed, sober-visaged men, men such as she had seen every day of her business week trooping in and out of Kunio Michita's office.

Fukuda leaned unobtrusively toward her, whispered, "The third man on your left. The one with the pencil mustache and the largest bets in the house. He is the senior vice-president for administration for Kaga.''

Honno watched as if enwrapped by a kind of enchantment, as the senior Kaga officer proceeded to lose 6,500,000 yen-approximately $50,000-in just over an hour. By that time his hair was disheveled, his tie was askew, there was sweat beading his pencil-thin mustache, and he was frantically writing out a marker for an equal amount. The marker was passed from one Yakuza to another until, at length, it arrived at the head of the table.

A bald man with the image of a dragon tattooed on his shining skull took the slip, read it. Then he looked up, poker-faced. With a little thrill, Honno saw that he was looking directly at Fukuda. Fukuda gave an almost imperceptible nod, and the man with the dragon tattoo pocketed the marker, slapped three packets of yen onto the table, had them passed to the Kaga officer.

Honno was wondering just how deeply Big Ezoe's claws had penetrated the Kaga conglomerate when they arrived at their third destination. They were still within the precincts of Shinjuku, but this was the far side, where sleazy streets were inhabited by all manner of nocturnal creature, where it was often not safe to walk deep in the night when these creatures slithered out of their lairs. Honno had certainly heard enough stories of this section of Shinjuku-every resident of Tokyo had, she imagined-but she had never been near it.

"Have no fear, Mrs. Kansei," Fukuda said, as if reading her mind. "You are with me." They stepped out onto the rainswept streets. It was now well after midnight.

There was a scent Honno was not familiar with. It was the stench of the effluvia of a large city-any city-where a certain section of human wreckage congregated: the psychologically halted, the emotionally crippled, the perverse and the perverted, caged, sent down, inhabiting a nighttime netherworld in the bowels of the city.

The Mercedes had stopped opposite a dark bridge over which rumbled an endless line of trucks which only had access to Tokyo's streets during the night.

Fukuda did not lead Honno across the bridge, but rather took her down under it. She could hear the lapping of the river against ancient wooden pilings, and the stench of decomposition was very strong.

They went into a building. Honno recognized it as an akachochin, an assignation bar, where anything and everything could be bought-for a price.

In the unpleasant crimson illumination of its interior, Honno saw beautifully clothed and coiffed women whispering on the arms of salesmen, low-level businessmen who could not afford the more affluent after-hours clubs in Nihonbashi or the Ginza, where even the price of one drink could take your breath away.

"The man directly in front of you," Fukuda said unexpectedly, "the distinguished one with the thick gray hair, is the chairman of Kaga. He comes here because of his sexual proclivities. He is certain that no one who would recognize him would ever frequent such a dive."

"But he's wrong," Honno said. "You've recognized him."

"We are always wrong," Fukuda said cryptically. "Big Ezoe owns this akachochin. You would be astounded at the wide range of information that may be acquired in places such as this." Fukuda nodded. "Now watch as we walk past the creature who has the chairman's undivided attention."

Honno kept her eyes on the beautifully dressed woman on the Kaga chairman's arm. As they passed the couple, Honno stifled a gasp of recognition. The woman was a man. A transvestite.

Outside the akachochin, Honno breathed deeply. She welcomed the rain pattering down on her. How her perceptions had changed. The night air, filled with decomposition, seemed almost pure compared to the atmosphere inside, gravid with sinister lusts.

In the sanctuary and comfort of the Mercedes, they slipped across the river, headed toward the bright lights, the modern high rises of an entirely different Tokyo.

In the Akasaka district the Mercedes sped them toward the Capitol Tokyo Hotel. In the Origami Coffee House, Fukuda ordered them the justly famous German apple pancakes. Honno found that she had no appetite. She watched in a kind of numbed silence as Fukuda ate his food then, determining she had no intention of eating hers, cut into her pancakes.

Five minutes after he had finished, as if on cue, he turned toward the entrance to the restaurant. Honno followed his gaze, saw to her amazement her boss, Kunio Michita, walk through the door. He spoke briefly to the hostess, who seated him at a table with a man Honno had not noticed before. Now she did. He was the finance minister of Japan.

The two men bowed cordially to one another and began to talk in animated fashion. They ordered only coffee, but hardly touched their order. Minutes later they got up to leave.

Fukuda paid the check and took Honno out. They followed the two men out into the semidarkness of the night. All around them glittering high rises bespoke the enormous wealth of the new Japan.

Honno could find nothing strange in this assignation. She saw only two men meeting for a friendly discussion. It was then that she saw the buff-colored envelope pass from Kunio Michita's hand to that of the finance minister's. It was quickly put away in the finance minister's inside jacket pocket. The men continued their stroll, their talk, as if nothing had happened. Ten minutes later they parted.

Fukuda and Honno continued their walk through Akasaka. Honno thought of the fantastic run of luck Michita Industries had had over the past year: winning bids, coming in at just the right time on government-sponsored projects, always being eligible for government incentives in new and emerging industries, closing down divisions just before the ministries declared their product obsolete or nonpriority. Now she knew that luck had nothing to do with it. No wonder it had not rubbed off on her.

All around them, the superstructure of Tokyo rose into the clouds and the rain. The sky was so low, it was bright with the city's efflorescence. Tokyo stood as a modern miracle of terra-forming. Honno had always loved this city, but now, as if with a twist of a kaleidoscope, she was seeing it from another vantage point.

She remembered, at the beginning of this evening, looking out the window of the apartment Big Ezoe had given her, seeing the moonlight play across the bosom of the Sumida River. A dream of hers had been fulfilled. But now she had been exposed to the opposite side of that dream, a nightmarish world that harbored every form of perversion, corruption, and deceit. And these two worlds were part of the same Tokyo. Her Tokyo. My God, she thought. What I've witnessed is monstrous. How will I ever fall in love with Tokyo again?

Fukuda led her into a small park. There was one stone bench. Honno could hear the soft tinkling of a stream but she could not see it. They sat on the bench, which had a view of the park's lone tree, a cryptomeria that leaned far to its right, as if caught in a high wind.

''I particularly enjoy this spot,'' Fukuda said, as if to himself. "Often, I find the grid of the city overly grim, like staring at a detailed blueprint for far too long. Its beauty is leached away by familiarity. Then I come here, and look at this cryptomeria."

"Poor tree," Honno said. "It looks as if the hand of God has mauled it."

"On the contrary," Fukuda said, "it seems to me that the cryptomeria's beauty is transfigured, made awesome by its pain. Look. The stark contrast of its bark and needles to the backdrop of steel and glass and neon; the twisting of its trunk arcs against the rectangles of the buildings. Whether nature or man is responsible for the tree's form, no one can say."

And then Honno understood what Fukuda meant. It did not matter which was responsible for the tree's form. Nature and man were here become one. This was the purpose of the cryptomeria, as if by its tortured appearance it could bring meaning out of the inchoate meaninglessness of the city.

"Yes," Honno said. "I believe I, too, would enjoy coming back here from time to time.''

It was nearly three a.m. Their last stop was a bunkerlike building in Shimabashi. It was made of ferroconcrete and was absolutely featureless, an ultramodern edifice set off by the older buildings that surrounded it.

Inside was a world of semidarkness, similar to what one found in the heart of a forest. "You may change in there," Fukuda said, indicating a door.

Honno went through, stripped, bathed, clothed herself in a fresh white gi, the cotton divided skirt, the loose overblouse of the martial arts discipline. She was alone in the dojo for several minutes. It was very different from the one she worked in with Big Ezoe at his club in the Ginza. This space was darker, far more forbidding. She felt as if she were deep in the castle keep of the Shogun, Ieyasu Tokugawa.

Fukuda soon appeared. He was wearing a protective wire-mesh mask and carrying two bokken, the traditional wooden swords used in kenjutsu practice instead of the steel katana. He also carried another mask.

"How are your swordfighting skills, Mrs. Kansei?" Fukuda asked as he threw her a bokken and the mask and began his advance, all in one movement.

Honno did not even have time to answer him. He took her through the entire range of attack and parry strategies, from firecut to fallen leaves, from sea-land change to crossing at the ford. Honno did her best to respond, but she was unused to being up all night, and this, combined with the shocks she had received while walking Tokyo's seamy underbelly, caused her focus to wander, and consequently made this an inauspicious time to work on her kenjutsu.

However, as she well knew, one could rarely choose the time of battle, and so one needed to concentrate within and through every conceivable type of situation. So she gathered herself, bore down a little harder with her mind and with her body.

And from this determination, she discovered something interesting: Fukuda was toying with her. She could sense it now that she was concentrating, in the laziness of his parries, in the haphazard manner with which he chose to move from strategy to strategy.

There was, as a foundation of Honno's curriculum in kenjutsu, the necessity to unlock the secret of your opponent's strategy. With that knowledge, one divined weaknesses as well as strengths. Now one's own strategy was quickly formed: a series of attacks and parries, building in a kind of crescendo, to weaken the opponent bit by bit, to strip him of his defenses, and then to attack with the one, swift fatal strike.

What was Fukuda's strategy? His haphazardness made his intentions impossible to fathom. But the real question was, was he merely sloppy or was he being devious? Was he hiding his strategy or did he, in fact, have none?

Honno's kenjutsu sensei had told her that it was far better to overestimate an opponent than to underestimate him. With this in mind, Honno kept her concentration strong and slowly expanded her wa.

She did not seek in any overt way to take control of the match. This, she suspected, was just what Fukuda wanted her to do, and in becoming careless, to fall into a trap he had tying in wait for her. She had not forgotten me lesson learned in her aikido bout with Big Ezoe, and she was determined not to repeat her mistake.

To the untrained eye nothing appeared to have altered in the match. Fukuda was still dictating the random flow of strategies. But the slow expansion of Honno's wa was making its presence felt. She attacked with more strength, parried with greater swiftness, counterattacked with more terror. Slowly, she was moving the field of battle across the tatami mats of the dojo, until Fukuda was nearly backed up against the edge of the battlefield. To step outside the perimeter onto the polished wooden floor would mean defeat.

Now Honno expanded her wa to its fullest and, as she did so, her body went limp. The bokken dropped from her hands, and as Fukuda's wooden sword slashed downward at her head, she reached up, caught it between the palms of her hands.

Fukuda immediately stopped, bowed to Honno. "Big Ezoe was indeed correct about your warrior's spirit."

"But I am a woman," Honno said. "And history records so few women warriors.''

Fukuda took off the protective mask, and Honno gaped at the face beneath. "Is that you?" Honno whispered, coming closer. "The real you? "

The face that, without lipstick, behind a pair of man's sunglasses, had seemed so handsomely masculine, had now been transformed into a paradigm of feminine beauty. And in that transformation Honno saw the falseness in the concepts of ''handsome'' and ''beautiful" with which she had been brought up. She saw only the truth of the reality that Fukuda had brought home to her: perception of the world, and how it was constructed, was nothing more than a spiderweb of lessons absorbed with your mother's milk.

"I, too, am a woman, Mrs. Kansei," Fukuda said. "I am sensei in sixteen separate martial arts." Her dark eyes shone, not with pride, but in reflection of the revelation she recognized illuminating Honno's face. "I have defeated more men than I can count in the kind of kenjutsu match we have just completed. I urge you to believe me when I tell you that the warrior spirit resides in us both."

Now they left the dojo, their field of battle, their place of coming together, and they showered together, dressed together, and went back out into the waning night. It was close to five a.m., and Honno wondered what they were going to do until six, when she was to meet Big Ezoe at his Ginza club.

She soon had her answer. The Mercedes glided back toward the futuristic colossi of Shinjuku. The streets were emptying even of the trucks. Their rumbling across the bridges spanning the Sumida came like distant thunder, endless, echoing through the deep canyons of the city,